When Hafiz had invited me over for a treatment, I guess in my excitement I had imagined a gamut of therapeutic practices slightly more sporting in scope and dexterity than what he’d ultimately prepared. Because after sitting on lounge chairs all day under the shade canopy, sipping iced teas to stay alert, and listening to him chuckle whenever a caravan of clouds sauntered past the revealing sun, or mumble an appreciative syllable when the wind […]
Each of my wounds, every pain, was a withholding. Never mind the reasons. You don’t need ten plagues to make the point if you have the miracle of uncertainty in your life. It teaches unceasingly, without relent. I realized the other evening in the car: the only fear I’ve ever had is a question about what I might be asked to give. Jesus knows this question well—has explored its every angle— but no one can […]
Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]
There’s a new policy in heaven I wish to discuss. Instead of a life review, they set you out in a meadow full of this special grass that tickles your feet incessantly— a meadow with songbirds full of mirth and wit that line up in the sky to land on your shoulder one after another and offer a joke or a poem before disappearing altogether… Oh—! …and of tornadoes that swoop through sporadically, thunderous, crashing […]
It’s only been a few days, but I’m back for more. The life of an addict. My moments have become cracked glass, but there is a hint of honey in my tears. It’s been a bittersweet epiphany: I’m not cut out to be the person I’ve been being. I’m a crash test dummy careening into the wall of nothing whatsoever. For a moment I was full and clear, a moment without the traffic, unfettered, remembering what […]
So… Jesus and I are taking a little break. You have to set boundaries. have to have to have to have to My side is like this: after a couple of fervent decades during which time I was strung out on mantras, kale juice, free range chicken egg beaters, galactically resonating yoga poses, tantric how-to illustration books, and uncompromising techniques of detachment, I turned the cracked pavement corner of my block to square up my […]
I used to think the very act of coming out to this frontier town, to this slat-walled refuge set down in the wild light and crooning darkness, would be sufficient. A proof of concept. Like I could purchase everlasting freedom with an act of unexpected boldness. Without thinking it per se, I believed that after packing just my necessaries and lashing them down, selling the house and the grandfather clock, then riding west across creaking leagues […]
Once Hafiz and I were walking along the beach beneath a violet sky that had gathered around a glowing sliver of the moon, speaking existentially about sunken barques drift wood hand-carved initials and the audacity of the ruffled tulip, when the pounding surf whistling winds and rush of mad-honking gulls tripped a lever inside of my famished organs of persona. I was suddenly swimming in the need to give my whole life away, to tear […]
I Jesus is my breath. He is the blood in my veins, the white of my bones, and the thoughts of my heart. He is the stones in the ground, the birds in the field, and the wood drifting down the river. Behind the wincing in thieves, the sighs of politicians, and the crackling static of the sherriff’s radio when no one is near, you will find him. He is the root, the marrow, the […]
There is a being inside of me, perpetually spilling over the banks– One whose color I cannot name, whose voice patterns the sky with tender pulsations. I, myself, cannot direct the geese, but the One inside of me points the way. Whisking through a cold half-light, each feathered movement unerring in its answer to the previous, they glide from one world into the next and back again in one full beat of their wings. When I […]
Embracing Forever 